I WAS awakened in the middle of the night by what sounded like world war three in my house. There were sounds of screaming and crying and flailing around coming from my cage of cotton top tamarins. When I got to the cage I heard another noise, a high-pitched whine. I looked at the bottom of the cage and saw a little lump. It took me a while to work out that it was a couple of babies. I hadn鈥檛 known that the female was pregnant.
What was happening astonished me: the female was rejecting her twins. Baby tamarins are programmed to hold onto their parents with all their might, but this mother had never experienced this before because she was captive-bred 鈥� and it terrified her. In the wild, young monkeys get used to having babies cling to them: they often carry younger siblings. They learn that it is normal to have a tiny creature clinging tenaciously to their fur. When baby tamarins are born, they crawl up and lie across the top of the back below the neck, so the mother cannot see them. In this case the mother had no idea what was going on. She ran around the cage, slapping at the babies, trying to get them off. She turned her back to the cage wire, and tried to rub them off.
Eventually she bit them. It took her several minutes to get the babies to loose their grip. The babies then lay at the bottom of the cage, grasping the mesh and crying. The mother was at the top of the cage, breathing rapidly and looking panicked. Once I had taken the babies away, she jumped into her nest box and that was that.
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I reassured myself, this is the first litter 鈥� surely they will do better next time. Parenting by captive animals often improves with experience. Well, my monkeys never got it. Time after time we鈥檇 have violent confrontations. The mothers kept rejecting the babies. The idea of an animal rejecting its young is outrageous 鈥� you don鈥檛 see it in the wild.
Initially, the rejected babies were cared for by a wild-caught foster mother, and because they were raised in a normal family group they grew up to be good parents. When the foster mother died, I tried again with the biological parents. I鈥檇 place the newborn twins in a small cage beside their parents, and try to involve the parents. After a time, the parents seemed less afraid and more curious. They eventually tolerated having the infants in their cage, but stiffened when the babies attempted to cling to them. They rejected subsequent babies at first, but finally allowed the newborns to cling on. As the family group grew and other family members helped the parents carry the babies, there were no more rejections.
I鈥檝e found my work with tamarins really useful for human parents, who can be very hard on themselves. I often see patients with parenting problems, and they say: 鈥淚 don鈥檛 have a maternal instinct, what鈥檚 wrong with me?鈥� I try to show that it is not a matter of instinct but of experience and support. It is important they know how to get the experience they need through parenting books, therapists, support groups, just as I helped the captive-born tamarins get the experience they needed. When I had my own children it was helpful to know that I was not supposed to know everything instantly, and that experiences from my upbringing as well as what I could learn now would make me a better mother.
